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Fedora Core 2 Review
An anonymous reader writes "Linuxlookup.com staff member Rich Hughes posted his thoughts on the latest Fedora release with this Core 2 Review. "Fedora Core 2 is the newest release from The Distro Formerly Known As RedHat. Updates include the 2.6 kernel, KDE 3.2, Gnome 2.6, X.org replacing Xfree86 and numerous package updates. Having played around with SuSE 9.1, Arch .6 and Slackware 9 with the 2.6 kernel, I was interested in seeing how the Fedora team did with this release.""
The post has been up for 10 seconds and already the site is Slashdotted? :P
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
At first I was apprehensive. I already owned a nice baseball cap but that fedora looked nice. It slid gently yet firmly on my head coming to rest about 5 mm above my ears. It's done wonders for my sex life, too. Women come from all over to date the guy in the fedora.
Thanks Red Hat!
I believe a colleague has had some success installing core 2 on a Sony Vaio laptop - this is about the hightest recommendation for *any* distro ,-}
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
I enjoyed Fedora Core 1 for the most part. Updating things was a lot easier with all the registration (or at least the most part) for up2date gone.
I'm pleased with all the new toys in 2.6, and look forward to messing around with them.
Hi,
I use stunnel to access my campus news server via SSL and it worked fine with FC1. However after installing FC2 starting up stunnel gives me an error: unable to find "/dev/cryptonet" but still runs. However I cant seem to connect to the news server. Has anybody faced this problem?
Fedora Core 2 Review
.6 and Slackware 9 with the 2.6 kernel, I was interested in seeing how the Fedora team did with this release.
Category
Linux Distributions (O/S)
Distribution name
Fedora
Version
Core 2
Manufacturer name
Fedora Project
Provided by
Fedora Project
Price
Free
Review by
Rich
Fedora Core 2 is the newest release from The Distro Formerly Known As RedHat. Updates include the 2.6 kernel, KDE 3.2, Gnome 2.6, X.org replacing Xfree86 and numerous package updates. Having played around with SuSE 9.1, Arch
Installation
Installation was a breeze. I like that Fedora provides the opportunity to test your discs. This is an idea Mandrake would be wise to copy. It is frustrating to get to disc 3 of an installation only to find that it didn't burn properly. I give the distribution credit for making this easy.
The install was fast. It installed 3.5 gigabytes in about 20 minutes. They myth that Linux is hard to install is not true for most modern distros. Hardware detection was great, my usb mouse and keyboard worked immediately. My onboard Nforce ethernet controller wasn't recognized like it was with SuSE, but I didn't expect it to be. My normal ethernet card was recognized and setup with no problem.
The System
My first impression was that it looks like RedHat 9. I don't care for the default icon set or the menu layout. The fonts look great, but that has become my expectation. There isn't a reason for ugly fonts anymore, so to trumpet the fact they look good feels silly. The panel is filled with Openoffice.org icons but missing a terminal icon. The boot splash screen is very attractive, if that is your thing.
The odd thing about Fedora is that it seems to be aimed at novice users but is inconsistent. We are given the choices Web Browser, Email, Music Player and Audio Player, but left with Kopete, Kget, Emacs and so forth. Either your user knows what Kopete is or they don't. If you are simplifying the menu, do it across the board or don't do it at all. This inconsistency extends to the system itself. It is pretty and newbie friendly at first, but if you need basic functionality such as mp3 playback you must hand edit the yum configuration file. Up2date freezes, but the command line program yum works well.
This leads me to my biggest problem with Fedora. On one hand, it is a great introduction to Linux. It installs easily, works well and is attractive. On the other hand, it plays right into the hands of Linux's biggest critics, which is the mistaken notion that it is unfinished and most things don't work. You are given a browser with no plugins, so if you jump online excitedly with your new system, there are a lot of things that won't work. You load your favorite mp3s, then find out you cannot play them. God forbid you have a dvd drive. You notice the red exclamation point telling you there are updates available, but up2date freezes leaving you unable to get them. I know there are fairly simple solutions to these complaints, but the fact remains that not everyone who tries Fedora will know how to do it. They will just feel disappointed by a system that lets them down, deciding that this Linux thing is not ready for prime time. A program that would set up unofficial repositories with a few clicks would take care of this, along with some prominent documentation telling you how to get the things you need. I could not find any real documentation at the Fedora site, except for RedHat 9. This may be due to my lack of time to search for it, but if it exists, it should be clear where it is at.
Despite my complaints, there are things I like. The system is very responsive. Programs load quickly. With the exception of up2date, Fedora is stable. The splash screens look great. The look and feel, while not my cup of tea, is consistent throughout the applications.
Package Management
This is a nightmare. Add/Remove Applications provides me with the original
Seems like there is still no safe solution for this bug.
Some people report that they lost all their data by installing it.
I really can't understand how they released it with such bug.
Heck, all of the Fedora download sites have been slashdotted since the "Fedora Core 2 Officially Available" story from May 18th!
Have you Meta Moderated t
I really like it alot, so far no problems. The only thing I don't like about a fedora box is that I have to hunt around for weeks to get the necessary multimedia stuff in it. It ships with full blown mozilla, that will be gotten rid of here shortly in favor of firefox. Great distro but alot of post install work to make it into a usable desktop.
Got Code?
FC has finally won me over following half a decade of Debian zealotry (much of that spent maintaining several packages and participating in the Debian development cycle). Twice a year, FC provides a fairly stable release that I can share with friends, and allows me to track the latest software releases without destabilizing my system as Debian unstable (and even testing) used to. I think Fedora has really hit the sweet spot by releasing a stable platform every 6 months and then making it easy for users to keep their applications up-to-date (with apt-rpm) without being forced into upgrades of glibc or other core libraries at the same time.
That, and the fact that FC is actually _more_ free than Debian following the prompt removal of all MP3 and similar tained code leaves me asking:
What more could you want from a distro? The latest FC2 installer was particularly stunning, making LVM2 setup trivial for the first time. This is really what Debian should have been.
I use rug, part of Red Carpet, for updates and IMO it's much better than up2date. Yum, apt-get, etc are also popular methods.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
I've been using it since tuesday, and my biggest complaint is CIPE being dropped, and the gui setup not being updated for the new IPSec tools.
;)
IMHO, they should have kept cipe ( depreciated maybe, removed next release ), but added the new userland tools and gui for the ipsec stuff in the kernel. Give people some wiggle room, for those of us using vpns.
Of course, it'd also be nice if they included support for pptp out of box...but I digress.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Thats what happen when using Fedora Core ;)
"...a generation of kids has grown up thinking Trance is the shittiest music since country and western." - Paul van Dyk
I've installed this on my machine after trying an upgrade from FC1 which resulted in extreme flakiness and instability. Things are more stable and run a lot faster than FC1. :-(
Now if only I could get the Cisco VPN client running under Kernel 2.6
-- "He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper a
Tried at work evrything seemed fine until the biggining of the actual setup...crashed al over itself with an error about not being able to write to memory...gonna try at hope on real hardware...
What's that Arch distribution the guy is talking about ?
He says you can get any package easy in the Article. I'm intrigued.
Anybody ever used it?
- Arwen, I'm your father, Agent Smith.
- Well, you're just Smith, but my father is Aerosmith!
Updates include the 2.6 kernel, KDE 3.2, Gnome 2.6, X.org replacing Xfree86 and numerous package updates.
I haven't had a chance to try X.org yet, how does it compare performance-wise with "good old" [snicker] XFree86?
I'm not normally an irrational zealous dickhead, but I figure "When in Rome..."
I'd started d/ling FC2 last night, but the deluge kept me from completing. Sounds like FC2 is pretty much the same thing with updated programs.
How does it compare to Mandrake 10 official, because I'm getting damned tired of waiting for the ISOs to be released to the public.
I got those back in FC2Test1. Strangely, it never really froze. Within the hour, up2date would always suddenly resume and complete the update. So no infinite loop, just horribly inefficient coding. There's a really bad O() somewhere in there.
I have installed it on a few machines already. The average end user who just wants to surf the net may not see massive changes if he/she used FC2. The changes are in speed and polish and of course updated packages. And GIMP2 is wonderful too. It is however an important release because it contains major updates to both desktops and the kernel which is vital for testing purposes so these updates will only be getting better and better!
So,
Can I toss this disk in my cd-rom drive, and have linux install and "just work?"
Like I did with windows 2000?
This isnt a troll. Its a serious question. I dont really use any windows specific programs anymore.. so....
I've upgraded to boxes so far, one from Fedora Core 1 and the other from Red Hat 9. Both have had issues.
On the RH9 -> FC2 upgrade (4-year-old Compaq Deskpro), there was an issue with the grub.conf file that prevented the system from booting. Fortunately, I had burned the rescue CD and was able to go in and fix it. Lesson learned: make sure you have a bootable disk available! This looked like a major issue at first glance, but turned out to be fairly minor.
On the FC1 -> FC2 upgrade (Dell Inspiron 5100), the actual upgrade went quite smoothly. However, I've been unable to build drivers for my Agere-based Proxim wireless card under the 2.6 kernel. After wrestling with it for several hours, I've decided to throw in the towel and buy a Prism-based card.
In both cases, I've seen an error message pop up when first logging in to an X session. It appears to be a remnant of the Xfree86 install that wasn't removed or completely replaced by the new X.org stuff.
In all, not too bad, but there's still room for improvement....
Slackware has been the most straightforward distribution I have used - no frills; lean, easy to upgrade packages, and no tricks. For those already familiar with the technical aspects of *NIX administration, is there any advantage of Fedora over Slackware?
Kernel panics during anaconda. The End.
I read the review expecting "everything was great, mickyshit sucks, the end" but what I got was an actual honest review of the product, amazing.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
I've been installing linux for years and I always get some problem that prevents me from using it. I'm running this on a dell inspiron 8200 with a firewire drive connected up to a pcmcia card. All I want to do is play some damn mp3s on this damn thing. Apparently they disabled firewire in the final fc2 because it "doesn't work." What the hell? I think this is a very important feature and if this got out I wonder what else they left out. I don't mean to sound like a troll, but I've been doing this all day and I just want it to work! Two kernel recompiles and doing a bunch of useless crap in the forums didn't help at all.
Well, I'm back in windows where it works out of the box. This isn't meant to be a cry for help for someone to tell me what to do since half the replies would be "well it works for me so linux rocks" and I don't need to hear that now.
DAMMIT!
Slashdot,
Please consider EITHER ONE of the following policies:
1) No mod points for people who redundantly copy and paste articles
2) Automatically create a mirror of stories you link (without permission, of course, just like #1 but more formal)
It's stupid to reward people for doing what you yourself know is not always legal to do. I don't even care if the story allows for reposting... these are as annoying as "First post!"
So even when it's not content theft (and actualy legal), it's still wrong because it rewards laziness (the bad kind of laziness).
It's also a quick-and-dirty way for future trolls to accumulate karma and mod points, allowing the trolls and biased weenies the ability to tilt slashdot even though they are a brand new account.
Suggestion #2 is rhetorical.. you don't want to get sued, but you might as well formalize what mod points (wink wink nudge nudge) encourage. But if you don't get sued and do it, then we won't get the "heroes" doing slash-copy-paste.
so why has no one come up with a solution for this problem. now i'm a huge linux zealot and use FC1 (will upgrade as soon as the slashdot effect is gone from the download sites) so this isn't bashing. but it just amazes me that i've yet to come across a distro that, out of the box, has a browser with all the bells and whistles! and let's face it - the average jane wants all the bells and whistles! so enlighten me - why is this so hard? thank you, peace, good night.
nature loves variety::society hates it get your variety at http://www.monkeypantz.net
don't know what you're talking about. mebbe _you're_ the one with the problem. kthx.
Yeah... Is it good, or is it whack?
Anyone notice how much memory and harddrive space these two distros take up? I'm sure it has been talked about over and over, but RH 9.0 and FC are not for the older and slower systems of say a P2 400 with 128mb of Ram. /.
It's almost as bas as trying to install WinXp on a PII 400 with 64mb of Ram - which RH 7.2 runs nice and smooth....
just my two cents
Except that it's not a first effort. I've been a redhat fan since 4.something. We still use it at work and I use it at home. I intend to stick with fedora and have no plans to jump ship. That may change if future releases follow the quality of this one. I fell afoul of the partition table issue with core1 which caused me two evenings of hair pulling prior to figuring out a way to save things. That plus a couple of hours of win updates to repair the win xp installation. A very minor part of that process was to force the boot loader to be lilo and not grub. Small thing but it was material to saving everything imo. The announcement the other day noted this partition table issue still existed. Not to be put off by the issue I mentally resolved how I got around it last time and how I'd approach it this time. Off we go.... I certainly avoided grub but geeeze the 'upgrade' to lilo meant I couldn't boot Core2! The upgrade process 'upgraded' /boot/message to be nonexistant so the machine would only boot to the default win xp. It's a very minor issue and it was easily resolved but I am blown away that Core2 comes with two means in which to make your system not usuable.
Similarly I tried the upgrade on a test machine here in the office just this morning. I was ready for /boot/message this time on top of everything else... But would it boot? Heck no! The misreading of the partition table resulted in it dying when it tried to reboot after the upgrade (from rh9) since it now thought the previously acceptable boot partition had too high a cylinder number.
I'm trying a complete install as I type... Fingers crossed but only time will tell.
As I said I intend to stick with redhat/fedora for the forseeable future but if this type of scenario is repeated on future releases then I will be off to greener pastures. I went with linux to avoid quality issues with M$ products (whether you agree or not). I won't stick with this distro if the quality goes down hill. Every dog gets one bite and this is redhat's
there is an rpm for fixing the MP3 thing which i can't be bothered to point out to you. Google it. The X.org server is a fork of xfree86 with a different liscense...no real difference yet
I've got a recommendation... Fix the grub error. That is the most important feature of any installation in my opinion. The fact that boot loaders still have bugs in them after years of work amazes me. I installed Fedora Core 2 last night. Everything went well during the install, then when it rebooted itself... Grub error. can't boot anything. can't boot Windows, can't boot linux. can bearly read the screen because of artifacts. Fedora is a great product, but if you can't boot into it, its useless.
http://github.com/gbook/nidb
My impression of Core 2 is that it is a lot like Core 1, only better. I like it.
The review criticizes Fedora for lacking mplayer, xcdroast, dvd ability, concluding it lacks basic "functionality". Now, in addition to RedHat's well-known stance on mp3's and other IP issues, I think it is safe to say that a lot of Linux users -- myself included -- don't count listening to mp3's and playing DVD's as part of basic functionality. Not that it isn't for a lor of other folks, but it isn't for me and, presumably, it isn't for the market any future Fedora-based commercial release is intended for. (Besides, my sound system is within arms reach, it cost more than my PC, and it sounds a lot better. I've never seen why I should bother to copy tracks from my CD's to my PC and put up with degraded quality.)
That said, I updated with up2date immediately after installation with no delays or stalling. Yum, on the other hand, is much slower and can appear to stall out. (My FC1 experience was just the opposite.) In addition, Yum offered to install packages that up2date did not. That should not happen. The Fedora user should have only one choice of updating his system, it needs to be fast and foolproof, and the user should never be expected to edit the list of sources used by the update tool. This is a problem RedHat will need to solve if it ever wants to make money from a Fedora-based release.
I also agree that commonly used plugins ought to be installed by default. At the very least, add their installation to the post-install routines. Point the user at the right repositories and then lead him through the installation.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Former Redhat user here just wanting to chime in after reading the FC2 review. My first run-in with RH was at 7.3, I believe. (distro discs bought at a Comdex a few years back) That was ok. I was rebelling against KDE's Windowsy look, opting for Gnome, so it didn't really matter to me what the default was.
/home and thus suffered complete obliteration.
/home directory.
I eventually climbed the evolutionary ladder onto RH9 thanks to a DSL line and a cd burner. I also switched over to KDE/Liquid for the "ooooh" effect. Life was grand. Then I found freshrpms.net which had stuff the distro wouldn't cover...like mp3 playback.
Then there was the fedora project, which had stuff freshrpms didn't have (blender), so I added them to the sources list. After a while, Fedora became the sanctioned public distro of RedHat.
Wanting the latest KDE (now from the kde-redhat folks), I think I made the mistake of apt-get upgrading one too many times with conflicting repositories. I managed to get it running at some point, even running the great k3b a few times. Eventually, an update borked the machine. Gnome files were deleted, X would fire up but there were errors preventing either KDE or Gnome from starting at all. Panic mode on!!!
Took out my RH9 cd's and reinstalled that. Thank (insert preferred deity here || self) for backups. I had always been dumb enough to accept the default partitioning which didn't separate
After RH9 installed, I got networking to run, went to the mandrake site, downloaded 10 CE, and installed it. mp3s worked straight after install. Networking didn't, though, and that sucked, but managed to get through it. An RPM from the PLF settled the whole DVD thing.
In the end, I got KDE, most of the apps I need, and the great pointy-clicky way of installing those old MS Fonts from the Win98 days. I'm now more paranoid about using unofficial repositories. The Mandrake Upgrade shoots me over to contribs which is scary as it is, but I try to watch what I upgrade anyway. And the default mdk way of partitioning isolates the
Overall, I like mandrake. It's easy to install, easy to use, purtty, and though laborious to update at times, it's darn good. And my old copy of UT runs faster than it did with the ol' RH9...though I assume any new distro will have that effect.
From the review, it seems FC2 suffers from the same things that eventually caused me to switch.
Installed on a HP AMD 2500+ laptop the day of release. The advanced features of the touchpad (tapping, scrolling) didn't work (they did in FC1).
After finding the Synaptic driver and modifying the X config file (something I don't do lightly), everything is good.
So far as I know, the a/b/g onboard wireless card isn't supported in linux, and I haven't had an opportunity to use firewire, but overall the distro works great.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
GNU Arch. It's not a distribution. It's a version control system like CVS or subversion.
rootnoverify (hd0,0)
chainloader +1
In Soviet Russia, distro thrashed your windows install.
Oh no, wait....
Fedora Core 2, ehh. Its okay. One major problem for me...
Activestate's Komodo dosen't work. I found out the hard way. Although the next version of their IDE will work on Fedora, I'm still switching back to SuSE (ahh, Novell) 9.1 for my workstation. Fedora only gets an 'ehh' review from me.
Sorry in advance for the n00b rant. I am an experienced Wintel and MacOS hacker and familiar with other Unix flavors --- but not Linux. I have a PIII laptop that would otherwise be gathering dust and am wanting to put some Linux distro on it. I played with FC1. Slow, hard to upgrade, hard to customize, etc... What is a good distro for basic office tasks, playing MP3's, reading PDFs, etc? And should I just go with FC2 and install a bunch of other stuff? No, I'm not wanting to hack it (maybe later) so dev tool support isn't an issue.
Possibly a poll is in order for this one:
Best office distro:
- Fedora Core 2
- Red Hat 9
- Mandrake
- Debian
- Something else
- I have no computer you insensitive clod! Ooops...
#include "humorous_pop_culture_reference.h"
I feel your pain. I've had a 100GB firewire drive sitting on my desk collecting dust for about 2.5 years. It's never worked with linux, but works fine on Windows.
I finally dropped $35 on a generic USB 2.0 3.5" external HD enclosure (with cable). Problem solved.
Good luck mate.
My impression overall was very good. I hadn't installed a desktop Linux distro in a year or so, and Fedora was light years ahead of what I expected.
Installation, printing, sound, video, network, mouse, all worked perfectly with no tweaking.
My digital camera would register as /dev/sda1 when I plug it in, though I have to mount it myself, and my webcam (Logitech QuickCam Messenger) doesn't work at all.
Installing Java and Flash wasn't hard, and Thunderbird / Firefox was trivial.
The desktop looks very nice, and shortcuts, panels, menus, preferences were all intuitive.
Utilities like the music player and CD ripper are well done.
Great work by the Gnome and Fedora teams!
Try vpnc - http://www.unix-ag.uni-kl.de/~massar/vpnc/
It got me working again.
after how many hours of testing?
"GNU Arch [gnu.org]. It's not a distribution. It's a version control system like CVS or subversion."
NO. It IS a distribution. I tried out their 0.6 release and I was impressed. Arch Linux isn't for newbies (you need to manually edit config files), but is the fastest distro I've tried yet and has a really nice package manager called pacman.
Take a look here: http://archlinux.org/
IMHO, slackware 9.1 is the cleanest, most
well thought out linux distribution going.
(Okay, it might not be intended for newbies,
but I went from MS-DOS and Win31 to the 0.96
distribution of slackware without any problems.
And, it has only gotten better since then.)
I am running the very latest (2.6.6) kernel,
ext3 primary with xfs raid0 (on IDE), and making
great use of the PC-Card, USB2, and Firewire
for my graphics work. 9.1 was advertised
as kernel 2.6 ready (and it was).
I tried the Fedora FC1 release on the same
platform, but experienced problems with
the raid controller, Firewire, my WiFi card,
and the DVD-R drive. Unless Fedora FC2 is
head and shoulders better than FC1, I will
stick with Slackware 9.1.
Call me nuts, but playing MP3's these days is about as basic as being able to copy a file from one place to another.
True. However, if you go to rpm.livna.org and follow the instructions to add it to your apt/yum repository, you have access to everything that you want to play mp3s, dvds etc. Just do
apt-get xmms-mp3
and you'll be all set. Repeat for lame etc.
Anand Rangarajan anand@cise.ufl.edu
Just put them on your "foes" list and permanently assign them a personal "-5" modifier. That's what I do.
Will it install on my P-P-P-Powerbook?
Here a Sig There a Sig Everywhere a Sig Sig...
You might want to pay attention before you go off on a rant. A cursory glance at this thread would show you pretty clearly that several people commented on the originating site being down, and a few requests were made for someone to post the full text.
/.'ed
;p
I for one am glad the OP posted this because I am very interested in FC2 and I was really looking forward to reading this article until I found out it was allready
In short....chill
"The saddest words of mice and men, are not those which were, but should have been."
Although I could not find information on the main sites either, I found the following documentation very useful as I was really impressed with Fedora Core 2 and got everything I needed to work by following these tips!
A Fedora How To for Multimedia
An RPM repository that fedora.redhat.com and fedora.us could not release!
Arch is a nice distribution that feateures bsd-style initscripts, good package managment and up to date packages.
If you need a lots of handholding you should look elsewhere. If you are willing to learn you will find Arch refreshing. I installed it with three months of Linux experience (mainly RedHat) and it has worked for me without major glitches for eighteen months.
http://www.archlinux.org.
Arch Linux. It's an i686, 2.6 kernel, devfs, KDE 3.2.2, GNOME 2.6 using binary distro (similar to Debian except even more lightweight and up-to-date).
I use it all the time. My primary machine is still Debian but all my other machines and servers are running Arch. It requires a bit more setup work than Debian.
I like it because it is extremely lightweight but has an excellent packaging system (pacman). The packaging system (and all those packages) are pretty much the only reason I've stuck with Debian all these years and Arch is the first to come along that comes close (Gentoo is OK, but compiling is a waste of time). Although it doesn't have anywhere near the number of packages as Debian, I can see it growing rapidly.
An example of the sane thinking behind Arch: There is no "/usr/doc" directory. I always use manpages or go online to find documentation. I've never understood why so many distros include all that documentation. I mean you rarely use it (mostly just for setup), why make it take up disk space? Everything is online nowadays and manpages are easy/handy.
Also, the install is fairly raw (which is a good thing). It just works and is simple. They need to fix some stuff with regards to swapfile setup (like if you don't want a swap partition) but otherwise it is fairly easy. You almost don't even need the installer (just the boot CD). Too many distros go off with their crazy complex and broken installers that end up leaving you frustrated (*cough* Debian *cough*).
The ratio of people to cake is too big
The 3 easiest to learn are probably Mandrake, Fedora, and SUSE. But with that you lose some of the customization capabilities you mentioned.
.deb binary packages and you don't have to put a lot of strain on a mobile CPU and battery compiling source code all the time. But if you don't mind that, Gentoo is a great distro as well.
My personal choice is Debian. You may get the comments about the installer being hard, but there are plenty of HOWTO's on the net to guide you through it. But if you can get it up and going, you can customize til your heart's content, and updating is a breeze with apt-get install && apt-get dist-upgrade. Plus, all it puts on there is what you tell it to put on there. So you can just apt-get install openoffice, xmms, and whatever PDF viewer you like and go to town.
Gentoo is a good distro as well, but I just think it is easier with a laptop to just use Debian since most everything you do is
You may just want to give FC2 a shot and see what happens.
I installed it on my athlon64 shuttle XPC and at first anaconda kept stack dumping. I thought it was having trouble upgrading from the previous fedora install so I had it format the partition. I ended up with a grub prompt that would do nothing. I should have just tried to get fedora to install grub in a /boot partition but instead used the windows recovery. After that I could never get anything to work and even had to boot back into the fedora installer just to get the disk repartitioned in a reasonable way.
I ended up reinstalling win2k. Lost my saved games so it was not the end of the world but I had just reinstalled in january. It was not due to be done again for another 2 months.
I really can't understand how they released it with such bug.
Red Hat's always released occasional distributions with huge bugs that bit some fraction of their users; they're just identifying those distributions differently now. Instead of the suffix ".0", bleeding-edge Red Hat distributions are now being identified with the prefix "Fedora".
but on the other hand, FC is a free product.
/Rant on/
/Rant off/
Not bad for wanting to keep an imaginary deadline, but releasing FC2 while this bug is still active (http://www.onlamp.com/pub/wlg/4896) doesn't inspire much confidence in the product, especially if the temporary fix/warning is not that complicated.
(Bitten personally by the bug... my (easy) fix: play around with the bios primary HD AUTO/LBA/etc setting.)
Where the f*ck is the lilo option durring installation. I hate grub primarily for not wanting to R(grub's)FM since lilo did/does the boot managing job just fine.
Testing FC2 along side Mandrake 10. The question now is, which one is the less of two evils... FC2 or Mandrake 10.
FC2 broke my existing Linux partition table. So far, I have been unable to find a partition table for this particular drive/BIOS combination that works with previous Linux installations and FC2.
With my hardware, partition tables created with FC2 don't work with 2.4 kernels. Partition tables created with 2.4 are corrupted when installing FC2.
This is a serious failure, and FC2 should not have been released before addressing it.
If I HAD been able to even install this, there's the issue of trashing my Windows XP installation (bug 115980). That's always nice...
To top it off, the NVIDIA drivers won't work. That's easily fixed, but it kinda adds up...
JUNK!
-truth
I had a steady B+ in my AI class until I failed the Turing test...
On my Toshiba Satellite 2450 laptop, upgrading from FC1->FC2 I had exactly zero issues. Everything worked smoothly and ACPI finally worked for the first time. The new X.Org server worked great with my video-out for the first time ever, so I could use my laptop with an external monitor for the first time in a Linux system.
On my self-made desktop I had many many upgrading issues. The new X.org server didn't like the "xfree86" xkb rules that FC1 put in automatically (or at least I didn't put them there), and gave me multiple errors on X startup. It didn't output any sound because it borked ALSA, I had to fix it manually. And it didn't recognize either of my PS/2 mice, despite the fact that the anaconda installer picked one of them up A-OK. And finally it didn't recognize my USB compactflash adaptor that worked like pie under FC1 and Debian (both with kernel 2.4.x) -- I still haven't fix this, because it tends to crash the usb mouse operations when I try to copy files from my compactflash card.
So to summarize: on my laptop upgrading was pie, but on my desktop it would have been much simpler to reinstall the whole damn thing for a n00b. The moral of the story is... your mileage may vary... so expect some rough parts if you are upgrading.
501 Not Implemented
Mandrake probably wouldn't be a bad choice.
Note adding the right repositories into yum will fix the mp3 and video codec problems. I don't know why they don't install xpdf right off the bat. I like it better the acroread at this point. With these simplemods, Fedora would become my first choice.
Debian, gentoo, etc would probably have to high a learning curve, unless you really want to get into it. If you really want to learn linux, use gentoo, and do a stage one install. If you do this, you'll probably install several times, but you'll learn linux!
I take no responsibility for what I say. Even though I'm never wrong
I love how half of these posts are -
1. Waaah!! it doesn't have every browser plugin available and do my dishes!
And the other half -
2. It's too big and bloated! Too many features!!
I installed last night, and I was shocked and horrified to find it my keyboard no longer worked after the install. I have a USB mouse, but a PS2 keyboard -- the mouse worked fine, no keyboard -- it was only after X started that I lose the keyboard.
Aparently, this is a known problem with the 2.6 SMP kernel, and it's still an open bug.
Secondly (after resorting to the single CPU kernel), I was shocked to discover Alt-Tab didn't work properly in X -- it would outline windows, but not actually raise their focus. This was just plain annoying.
Then there is hte fact that firewire support is OFF by default -- comeon, this is NOT a new technology -- I have to recompile the kernel to use my external firewire drive? That's very disappointing.
- Not Impressed Thus Far With Fedora 2.
Here are my somewhat un-organized thoughts on this issue: Mandrake tends to be buggier (hopefully their new Community and then Official release system will solve this), has poorer configuration tools, but has more third-party packages and has urpmi, which is like apt-get. Basically, you type "urpmi programname" and it automagically downloads and installs it and any other programs or libraries it is dependent on. Mandrake is reasonably fast (moreso than Fedora)
SuSE has a GREAT configurator (called YaST), is stable, but has fewer third-party RPMS (and many of the sites are german-only, SuSE's home language), and there is no urpmi-like tool. It has a great manual though, but is a bit slower than Mandrake. It also has its own ways of doing things, and configuration and the structure of the filesystem are substantially different than other Linuxes. They also leave out divx and DVD support, due to legal concerns -- adding these is a snap in Mandrake (just add the PLF repository to your urpmi config and type urpmi mplayer), but is a bitch in SuSE (you have to track down a bunch of packages and dependancies from Packman). SuSE has a better selection of games. Also, if you want to config things by hand it is a cinch in Mandrake (Mandrake modifies your existing config files if you use the GUI tools), but it is a pain in SuSE (Suse ignores or writes overtop of your hand-made files next time you do anything in YaST -- things you hand-configured will not be picked up by YaST, it maintains its own internal database, and then writes that out to the normal config files.)
If you just want a machine that is ready to go for basic office tasks, SuSE is probably best. If you want to potentially customize your system a little, Mandrake is probably the best.
Both include a full set of dev tools, but they are not installed by default.
Well I was about to toss my new AMD64 machine into the drink with Core 1 (which was a late add-on to the effort released after the fact). NFS problems, Java from sun failed to run, automount was rather flaky. Is still see some minor problems with window resizing under KDE but other than that its been smooth.
I understand the legal issues that keep things like mplayer and such out of the distro. However it would be nice of we could start getting some RPMs for x86_64 out there.
Today is a gift. Save the receipt.
Mandrake makes ISOs available, and they include slightly less stuff, but they are considerably more complete. By purchasing a MandrakeClub subscription you get access to commercial packages and extra software, and access to support and a support forum. You could also by the Mandrake Powerpack, which is 5 CDs and includes a fair bit of stuff not on the 3 CD set. I believe that MandrakeClub members can download Powerpack ISOs or that the stuff in Powerpack is in MandrakeClub, but I'm not sure.
Call me nuts, but playing MP3's these days is about as basic as being able to copy a file from one place to another.
There are better alternatives to MP3. Of course that is not why MP3 support was removed. It was removed because of patents, and that happened already around RH7.3 IIRC. Since then I got MP3 and DVD playing programs from freshrpms. Looks like there are no FC2 packages there yet, but I believe they will come. Until then you could try the FC1 packages.
But what's with the no xfree86?
License changes. What you get instead is AFAIK a fork from just before the license change, so it is really the same software, just a new name.
I got a Linux distro working, the GUI was *slow as hell*.
Probably driver problems. Are you sure you are using the right hardware? I know some of the desktop environments have been bloated. But I think they have started caring about it. It is long time since the last time I felt the GUI had become slower from an update.
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
Something that I've had a problem with since RH8 was the boot disks using the frame buffer right off. I have a Fujitsu Lifebook 530T which goes black after before the language selections (Which should be a curses or dialog menu anyhow). I'd like to be able to disable fb totally on boot with the install disks, but haven't found a way to do that yet.
Any suggestions? I would REALLY like to get Mandrake 9.2 off of it.
-What have you contributed lately?
Mandrake 10.
Get all the things you need installed off the bat, much less configuration to do after install and it just plain works.
I have gotten tired of the bugs in the official Red Hat releases, tulip drivers anyone? Why would I want to install some community built but still IP crippled distribution?
Suse - The FTP install option kinda bites. I'd rather download my isos, thanks.
Gentoo - get a life, who has the time...
Debian - how out of date could it be? Yes I can update it but again, who has the time...
Redhat 9 - it's dead, remember?
I think the Gentoo and Debian distros have good purposes and suit some people well, but I can't for the life of me figure out why anyone would be wasting their time with Fedora.
I have installed so many different distros of *nix. I am currently running FC1. I have tried to upgrade to FC2, but for some reason the install just hangs after loading the vmlinuz image. I have tried everything and anything. I found a small group of people who have ASUS mobos (new and old) that seem to have this problem. Does anyone know about this issue and if there is a fix? I have even posted on the Fedora mailing lists to no avail. Just leave a post or a link if you have any info.
PIII 6000
512 MB memory
ASUS P3C-2000 Mobo
Does the new kernel directly support SATA controllers and drives? Most new computers I have built recently use SATA hard drives.
RC1 was a disaster for me. I have standard hardware all over and ran into problems with Geforce 4 cards/Nvidia drivers, Sound Blaster and USB devices. RedHat 9 worked great with the same exact hardware. Made me wonder what was going on.
On a side note, Those same systems ran SuSE 9.0 just fine and Debian. Definitely not the hardware failing.
I've come to realize that perhaps I should build my own Linux distro just for kicks. So far so good. I'll still use a regular distros but at least I'm much better prepared in case something like RedHat / Fedora happens again. Here is how I did it.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
Do not use FC2 then. Also, if your elbow hurts when you swing your arm that way, do not swing your arm that way.
Sincerely,
Common Sense
And I thought I was the only one...
I tried to install Core 2 on my 5 year old Thinkpad 390e (don't laugh - I got it used and it was cheap and all that really matters is the 14" screen), and I had nothing but problems setting up pcmcia devices. I would have thought those problems would be solved by now. Getting wireless to work was impossible using the GUI tools - I had to hack the wireless.opts file instead. I had all kinds of problems with up2date, too. My winmodem wasn't detected (no surprise there), but I would think that installations should be able to support winmodems right out of the box.
While I know how to hack workarounds for these problems, I am old, cranky, and just don't want to. I have better things to do with my time - like use my computer instead of configure it.
Why isn't there a distro that installs correctly, detects hardware (esp. 3+ year old hardware) and doesn't lock up when using the system utilities? Is it really that hard? Hell, if Microsoft can do it, certainly distro developers can.
I got the DVD edition from the torrent.
I burned the DVD on Windows on my 5680.
I booted from the DVD.
*10 minutes pass*
I'm running Fedora Core 2.
I was astounded by the installation time. Usually, I set aside at least 2 hours for a decent installation of ANY distro.
Now I just gotta wait until I can find a tutorial on how to get direct rendering working before I can start gaming on it...
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Err.. How is this off topic?
This post about how the parent post pointed out how the article misspelt the company name.
I really like it alot, so far no problems. The only thing I don't like about a fedora box is that I have to hunt around for weeks to get the necessary multimedia stuff in it.
a /linux/$rel easever/$basearch/freshrpms
I found this info quite by chance after moving from RHN to yum after installing Fedora core. I've posted this before, but here it is again:
Add these lines to your yum.conf (watch out for the slashcode extra spaces in the baseurl line):
[freshrpms]
name=Fedora Linux $releasever - $basearch - freshrpms
baseurl=http://ayo.freshrpms.net/fedor
And for all your patent-encumbered multimedia needs, you just need do:
% yum install mplayer
% yum install xine
% yum install [whatever else you want]
and it'll resolve all dependencies and keep you away from rpm-hell but still within RH's rpm goodness.
NOTE - freshrpms haven't got Feodra Core 2 rpms yet - give them time!
Xandros works really, really well for basic stuff. Nice and clean.
I had some trouble with sound on Mandrake 10 Offical, just made a high-pitch sqealling as soon as the daemon started on my Centrino laptop. I just installed over it as quck as I could. Nothing I did seemed to shut it up.
The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.
no update? what the hell are you talking about?
IT COMES WITH TWO UPDATE MANAGERS.
yum & up2date
you can download apt from the *extras* at fedora.us and then use synaptic.
do you even know what you're talking about?
"the last time i got a linux distro working" sounds like either a) you have *no* technical abilities (my mother can install it) or b) you havn't tried since the pre-v1.0 kernel days.
you, sir, are an ass.
Who gives a shit if requests were made to post the article? Doesn't mean some little bitch has to come by and post it to get his karma up. Could have just been their little bedbuddy requesting a post of the article anyways.
How about just posting it as a coward like they should.
My vote goes for SuSE, but then I'm lucky enough to work for a company that buys the Pro version of each update as soon as it's released. The default installer gives you OpenOffice, Gimp, XMMS and various others. The Kaffeine media player is crippled, but it's the work of about half an hour to download and install mplayer (via the standard ./configure, make, make install).
I currently have it running on both my laptops, the older of which is a PII 266. Yes, it crawls, but it's still quicker and more stable than Win2k was. On the whole support for laptops is pretty good.
"The dew has clearly fallen with a particularly sickening thud this morning"
Thanks a lot for a good reply - will check it out :)
Tried reading the review, all I get from their web server is "Session initialisation failed". Is this another web site that requires cookies? I don't mind that too much when I'm buying something, but why should I have to accept a cookie to read a news article or a review?
I don't know if it's possible for all the icons (e.g. those in the panel, open office etc.) but for window decorations and nautilus just change the GNOME theme from the GNOME control panel to something like Traditional.
Hence to a large approximation, "Slashdot should ban these moderators" should read "use your Meta-Mod powers to punish (eventually disallow) these moderators".
It's an issue of personal and collective responsibility.
Wikileaks, no DNS
Shouldn't it have been posted Anonymously, to avoid the blatant karma-whoring?
Having had some trouble with Japanese printing on Mdk10 Community, I thought I'd give this a try on a IBM T30 laptop with Mdk 9.2 just previously installed on it.
I did a fresh install of Fedora2, but even during install ran into a dumb fault that it took me two attempts to realize was *that bad*. The T30 has its own way to hibernate where it uses a special typed partition to store RAM contents on disk, but the Fedora2 installer insisted on calling it a swap partition with no other options, and then barfing just before starting to install, ie. after everything had been setup and made ready toi start the installation.
The only option there was to reboot: Ok or OK?
Mdk and others will leave partition types alone if they don't knows them, why can't Fedora?
And why am I allowed to go all the way to the end of setup of the installation and then only be given the option to reboot and loose it all?
And why does it take so friggin long time to install? The time estimater said around the beginning it would take 50min, but it eventually took >2.5h to just copy the files over. Even at the end the estimated 2min takes 5minutes, so something hasn't the right factors in it.
After installation my mainpoints were to get an HP printer working from OpenOffice and Mozilla with Danish and Japanese and hopefully an old parport Plustek scanner set up wit SANE as well, as I could see from the SANE site that it was well supported.
Wanting the default language to be English, but needing the odd time to print documents and webpages with Danish and Japanese I tested that, and that went fine, except that I can't type Danish characters from a Danish keyboard in OpenOffice. In KOffice, Abiword and the odd xterm I can do it just fine, and copy'n'paste them over to OO and print from there works fine too, but no matter how much I attempted to adjust OO to use Danish, it wouldn't accept Danish characters from the keyboard.
It turned out that if I set the LANG env variable to nothing it would work.
It won't let me add the Plustek scanner though, and xsane just won't detect it, even if I make its config files the only scanner available on the system.
The parport and config file are both set up according to the sane.plustek_pp man-pages, but the scanner doesn't seem to exist at all on this system.
I haven't figured out how to make it work, but at least Mdk10 had a wizard to help set up a scanner.
I am not sure if it is a 2.6 kernel related problem that needs some tuning.
I didn't try Fedora1, but Fedora2 is not as well made a distribution as eg. RH9 and earlier distributions were. It looks like bits and pieces have fallen off the edges during collecting them all, and even though they had such a long testing period.
Looking forward to other distributions with the 2.6 kernel in it.
I installed FC2 test3 and played with it, and FC2 final. Installed on my Toshiba 1135 laptop like a charm (dual boot). The GUI applets never have a problem configuring my wireless card. After setting the /etc/sysconfig/rhn/sources file to a good source (I like duke.edu) the updates work just fine.
Red Hat sure does make a desktop look pretty. But in configuring it this way, you also lose things:
* FC1 and FC2 have disabled the Gnome menu system. The RH bugzilla says it's because the Gnome code is buggy. The real reason has to do with how RH replaces menuing file system with their own that works across KDE and Gnome.
* You install RPMs at risk. On FC2 test3 I installed smb4k from a FC1 rpm. Lost my entire Gnome menu structure on restart. Oops!
* You install ordinary RPMS, etc. (such as Fire****) and the menus and other L&F don't match what RH installed. You might not even get it into the menus (What? You can't edit the Gnome menus to add Fire****? Too bad...).
* You don't get the experience promised in the user manual. For example, Gnome 2.6 help files say that in getting to SMB shares you go to the Network panel and click on "Add SMB". Red Hat has removed that.
* Actually, SMB connectivity is my main problem with FC. It will see your Windows network, allow you to see the computers on the net, but if you try to see shared folders it tells you that all folders on the target are unreachable. I can sometimes access a folder if I build a Location, setting the smb address and getting the right combination of username (with a \\domain?), password and maybe group (maybe not). Working blind.
It doesn't have to be that way. Load smb4k on other distros (SuSE, MEPIS, Knoppix, Mandrake). It almost *leaps* to let you see the shares. Access is a breeze. Install the same app on FC and it says smbmount (smbclient? smbload? I forget) needs more setuid rights. Just more obstacles. And I'm not totally sure on the security implications of giving those rights.
BTW, I turned off the firewall in case RH was having problems with SMB. Just for testing. No effect on the solution.
I'm coming to realize that various distributions are creating *brands* of Linux desktops. You get used to the menu structures and come to prefer them. But you get locked into branded RPMS (no more RPM compatibility, as tenuous as that was before). Or locked into certain package sources, such as Xandros with its customized GUI applets. God help you if the company goes under.
I'm currently inclined to base my laptop on the MEPIS distro, as it points at ordinary, and numerous, Debian mirrors.
YMMV, but that is my experience.
If Fedora shipped this stuff w/o paying the licensing, they'd get their ass sued off.
An good point.
So what I'd like is for the distributions not to ship anything that would get them into licensing troubles like this.
Instead, go the gentoo route of meta-distribution and, just as you get asked whether you want to download security updates, ask the user if they'd like to cruise out and download and install potentially useful applications for mp3, go over to an existing windows partition for which you're already licensed and glom onto fonts, DLL's etc.
The useful extra stuff shouldn't be difficult to install and use even if it doesn't come on the CD per se.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
There are a couple of other good repositories that have FC2 packages out now .
I've been running OpenBSD on Sony VAIO laptops (PCG-SR17 and PCG-F560) for years (since OpenBSD-2.7 anyway; fall 2000) with great results. I have them both in dualboot setups with whatever version of Windows shipped on them, to preserve some of the more interesting software bits that Sony bundles (as well as DVD playback, which wasn't really available back in 2000 on OpenBSD, via a PCMCIA DVD-ROM).
See http://darkuncle.net/OpenBSD/ for details.
--
illum oportet crescere me autem minui
Here is the top of a thread on the fedora-test-list mailing list, showing some of the reactions to the review. I've been watching the list for a while now, and I've gotta say that this is pretty typical of the childishness that goes on there. Which really worries me, since I'm getting ready to upgrade a whole department to Fedora soon.
I mean really. Who gives a fuck?
/without/ effort or are you pissed off because /can't/ accrue mod points /with/ effort?
Are you pissed off that they're accruing mod points
you
Either way you look at it, it's just a game.
Don't get upset at US because YOU have some personal problem.
I used the first Fedora. Liked it. Then I went to play some MP3s. Fedora made XMMS puke up a message with some BS about not supporting playing of MP3s. I stopped using Fedora right then. I could have hacked the problem, but decided not too. The principle of the thing bugged me.
Personally I'd much rather read the article and generate my opinions about it than have to guess what it said by reading other people's comments about it.
The fact is that sites slashdot links to often go down, and it's nice to be able to read the article without waiting a couple days for the site to be back.
I would like to thank the person who posted the copy of the article very much for doing so.
I've noticed that in the default Gnome 2.6 the terminal now loads a lot faster which is a big plus for me because most of my time is spent at the command line. I love the way Gnome now looks and acts. I think that Gnome is finally on par with KDE on speed of loading apps. Good job Fedora Team.
It's sad to see Fedora Core reviewers complain that it's missing desktop stuff without explaining that there's serious legal issues about MP3/DVD/Java/Flash/Real/Quicktime/Windows Media support for any distro that doesn't want to break US patent laws and be sued.
/etc/yum.conf at an (non-US-based) "Extras" repository and put all the missing goodies there (they can't be shipped with the CDs/DVD unfortunately) - this won't work for any software that is prohibited from being repackaged/redistributed though (Java?).
What I think the Fedora team should be looking at is some sort of whizz-bang "add missing things in at your own peril" installer package that could plug into the main command line/GUI installer (yum/apt/synaptic/whatever). This installer would actually go to the original site and do a download of the software, unpack, install it and configure any clients that needs that new software. This would stop the moaners whilst still keeping the shipped FC distro "open source, free and unencumbered from patents". Either that or simply point the shipped
*whack*
That's what you get.
Documentation takes up little space in comparison to the actual application. Debian goes a step farther and runs their docs through gzip to take up even less space.
Looking at the documentation provided with the package does a number of things:
1) makes sure you have documentation for *that release* of the package. If the web site updates their package and docs, you still have the correct documentation for the release that's installed
2) online docs help a whole lot when your network connection is down for some reason
3) Debian is ususally pretty good at including a changelog that shows what changes they might have made to the software while making it a package (what options they included while building, etc.). This may or may not be available online.
Both ndiswrapper (free and Free) and DriverLoader (commercial and proprietary) work on FC2. DL is more stable, though (ndiswrapper had a few occasional crashes every now and then, DL works flawlessly for me)
You can read my post about my first impressions (and problems found!).
Some highlights of changes in Fedora Core 2:
- They're using the new IIIMF input system for inputting text in several languages (Chinese, Japanese, etc..). It works similar to IME in W2K/XP, you've got a an applet on your panel (Gimlet) that let's you switch the input method easily. This replaces many conflicting and archaic X input systems.
- X.org instead of XFree86. Not really visible to the end user, but it feels to good to be free from XFree86.
- SELinux with full system policy for all packages. Still quite rough, I wouldn't recommend it for serious deployment anywhere, but interesting to play with. There's much more to supporting SELinux than just providing the software, almost every system of the distro is affected by the policy and must be modified and tested.
it's still in beta as far as i'm concerned...
i have the ati radeon M1o 64 mb agp 8x .. its on a laptop.. and i dont like the card and it dont like my 15"sxvga.. and ati dont have drivers for x.org.. or 800x600 or reboot..
i did reboot to xp...
If you're prepared to cough up the cash, SuSE is the strongest office desktop distro, no question. Everything configured out the box, ready to roll.
If you're looking for something free, as in beer, then based on recent personal testing, mandrake community is better than fedora. Does require a bit of tweaking post install, due to the patent issues etc, but not as bad as fedora.
Personally, I'm a gentooist, but that's definitely a distro for the fiddler, as are debian and slackware.
Remember kids, it's all fun and games until someone commits wholesale galactic genocide.
Who gives a shit about his karma? If you don't like how it's moderated -- meta-moderate. Otherwise, stop whining.
ATI doesn't have drivers for xorg or kernel 2.6 (yet), but it's possible to get them working.
here you go.
The core problem with Fedora isn't that it has bug X or is missing feature Y, it's that it isn't truly a community project so those issues aren't resolvable by the community.
MP3 support isn't a legal issue, it's a technical one, because there are technical ways of getting around the problem just like you stated.
But because FC is controlled by Red Hat and the community can't touch it those issues won't be solved because RH doesn't care to fix them.
What does all that documentation take up? 50MB? even 500MB? Totally worth it!
I love having all the documentation on my system. Sometimes you can't get online, or you can't easily find the documentation corresponding to your particular version.
Also with Debian, each package has a file README.Debian added to the documentation directory that describes how the package is modified to work with Debian. Very useful for things like Apache, Zope, and probably a million others.
Nobody actually looks at that stuff, you're a freak.
Go tell an OSX user to look up the README in some obscure location.
Ever hear of a GUI?
Too bad video isn't as easy in Fedora Core 2. I'm currently hacking to get video using either Totem or Gst-Player, using the Gstreamer backend... both are spitting up WARNING **: libgstplay: failed initializing pipeline, error: Could not link video output thread (cs and balance).
Changing the default sinks in gstreamer-properties from xvimagesink to ximagesink is no help either. Fedora really fucked something over this time.
Why do these idiots keep on insiting on
"revieving" Linux distros when they are operating
within an enviroment where their "opinions" carry
little nor no weight?
99.9% of the people doing these "reviews" have absolutely little or no knowlege of either Linux,
Unix or BSD, yet they try to come off as "knowlegeable" on the subject.
Most of these "reviewers" couldn't begin to
explain how to format a 1.44 meg floppy
under MSDOS, yet they claim they are "experts"
on things like Xwindows.
Sigh.
A number of people are reporting that the basic XWindows setup routine in Fedora Core 2 won't even start in the Microsoft Virutal PC application.
I also found the following interesting post on usenet:
From: "Colin Barnhorst"
Sender: "Colin Barnhorst"
Subject: Fedora Core 2 Final
Date: Thu, 20 May 2004 10:39:02 -0700
Before you even ask, the installation and configuration
problems you are experiencing with Fedora Core 2 are not
VPC problems. There are lots and lots and lots of
commentary on all kinds of device problems on the Red Hat
network. I have been reviewing the 'daily distributions'
of postings. The so called 'dailies' are coming hourly
as the sheer volume is flushing out the postings. Having
said that, there are a lot of good ideas and tips and you
should look to that source for guidance rather than this
one. You can subscribe to the mail lists at
fedora-list-request@redhat.com
couldn't download the ISO's, instead
downloaded the 5MB boot.iso and booted my Dell inspiron 8600 laptop currently running FC1 and
did http install/upgrade
NOTE: use freshrpms.net core 2 location..it was a breeze
1. used the upgrade option, it went without tech gliches except the Xkb errors..after upgrade copy your XF86Config to xorg.conf and change settings..
"XkbRules" "xorg". Also remove "nvidia" and put "nv", comment "glx"..and reboot to level5
2. since I was using freshrpms.net yum config, after upgrade, all my DVD/MP3/DVDRIP etc etc were upgraded as well.very smooth..good job Mattias, may ur tribe grow..
3. Now if those damn NVIDIA folks can release the
3D/prop drivers..that would complete my upgrade..
4. so far, my experience is good..still kept my same old expose-panther-SVGicons theme..u should try this..
As long as 802.11b support in the kernel sucks and people need to deal with shit like wlan and hostap drivers it will suck in any distro and also in Fedora Core 2.
If you expect normal users to use Linux on their notebooks there needs to be support for the latest wireless cards IN THE KERNEL!!! Period.
P.S. An excellent tutorial of this can be found here. Kudos to plate for making it. However, is is for Gentoo install and is slightly different.
First I used System Rescue Cd which has QtParted and resized my ntfs partition and created my linux partitions. I reboot and XP comes back up (it did s dskchk but was fine after that) so my XP install was still in tact.
Then I started FC2 install, when it comes time to setup the boot loader, I chose GRUB and checked the advanced configuration checkbox (Be sure to check that box!) On the next screen, you have it install grub onto your
Finish installation, I reboot and I enter WinXP. So everything there is still good there. Now I boot up with a LiveCD (I just grabed my Knoppix cd from the shelf). I open up a root terminal and type: where
That was it, dual boot FC2 and XP on same disk. Hope this helps.
It sounds exactly the same as release 1.
Red Hat is a changing environment. Now they want people to buy their EL distribution and it is very much in their best interest to just toss Fedora out there and let the world test it, and for every fixed feature, they move something else to the bleeding edge until the community fixes it for them.
Then they bundle up all the fixed enhacements and sell them in EL....
As soon as they moved to make the brands more distinct and made a clear statement that those serious about a stable, reliable environment buy EL, it was clear this would be the result.
Unless a distro is either driven by a non-profit organization (Debian, Gentoo), or is a revenue stream for a professional Linux company (SuSE, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux), you are going to see this. Fedora represents a huge conflict of interest at its core, Red Hat wants it to be a testbed platform for Enterprise Linux, and users want a nice, stable system. Without a few of these problems, it would detract from potential EL customers.
I run 2.6 SMP kernel w/ PS/2 and Xorg and basically all this stuff Fedora uses, and it works fine, with gentoo.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Apparently, the closed-source nvidia driver is incompatible with the kernel released with FC2. Not having 3D acceleration is a real pain.
Is there a good 3D card for linux where accelerated drivers are not a problem?
If you are interested in the whole nvidia driver thing, check out the Linux and NVIDIA graphics forums
total disaster (third result)
up2date is your last good option for package management on Fedora. Use yum (which is already set up for you- type 'yum update' in the terminal) or apt (synaptic if you like the gui thing)
As for classifying Fedora as a 'newbie' distribution, I find that slightly ridiculous. Lindows/Xandros/Mandrake/Knoppix/Lycoris are all way more friendly to new users than Fedora, although I would still argue that Linux is far from being ready for prime time Joe User.
Fedora is supposed to be bleeding edge, and thus not for the newbie that would be content with the ancient gcc,gnome,kde,mozilla, and whatever else comes with the newbie distros that is way outdated.
On an Averatec SL3150H
;) I might entertain a different distro; One that would better support KDE. Any suggestions?
Problem 1: I loaded *everything* (6GB+). And I cannot find 'gcc'! (Even as root.) Why wouldn't gcc be in the normal $PATH? Help?
Problem 2: Sound (AVI 8223 chipset) is broken, for every sound the OS tries to play I get an annoying buzzzzzing sound 'til the file is finished playing. However, have not tried sound in Gnome (probably works).
Problem 3: The mouse touch-pad works, but the "touch-to-click" doeasn't -- and it did for Yarrow.
Problem 4: When I "switch desktop" (to KDE) Gnome *still* defaults for each login. (Have to manually select KDE _every_time_!)
Problem 5: At least for KDE, there are NO screensavers (except to blank the screen). How's that for bias.
Other than that, it looks like it's Yarrow, only somewhat more biased
Sorry bout the dud link above.
proper link http://pptpclient.sf.net
People have been whining about the WinXP dual boot problem all day. This is a crock, and very easy to get around. You go out and buy a new hard drive, which will cost very close to zero these days, and use it as your Linux drive. Since all modern BIOSes can boot from any device you've got, you use the BIOS as your boot loader. When you want to run WinXP, you tell BIOS to use HD 0. When you want to run Linux, you tell BIOS to use HD 1. Problem no more. I have been doing this since RH7.3, and it amazingly continues to work. Windows doesn't know about Linux, and Linux doesn't know about Windows. And, most importantly, I can upgrade either one without affecting the other.
I've been using Fedora Core 2 thru Test 3 on a brand new IBM Intellistation A-Pro -- thats a dual Opteron 2.2Ghz workstation. And while Fedora Core 2 is a pretty polished product, I have serious issues with how 32-bit libraries and plugins are handled in it.
/lib64 and /usr/lib64 tree. So stuff like Realplayer, Mplayer (which uses 32-bit dll codecs swiped from Windows to make audio and video work for stuff like Quicktime and Windows Media), Flash won't work. To make matters worse you can't install the 32-bit Mozilla RPMs because the /lib and /usr/lib pre-requisites are not there, and theres no easy way to install them.
For starters, EVERY SINGLE APPLICATION is compiled for 64-bit -- that includes stuff that can use 3rd-party plugin modules like Mozilla, GAIM, Mplayer, XINE, etc. Mozilla is one of the worst problems because you can't run pre-compiled 32-bit plugins on the 64-bit browser -- it uses a totally separate
SuSE 9.1 handled this differently -- in their 64-bit version they provided duplicate libaries for 32-bit stuff, so you can RPM install 32-bit mozilla, gaim, openoffice, 3rd party apps, whatever, and all of their plugins.
Fedora Core could easily remedy this by doing what SuSE did. I hope they do, because otherwise Fedora Core 2 is a good distro.
Argh. For some reason double-clicking on a window titlebar maximizes the window instead of shading it. How the hell do I change it back?
I was running Fedora Core 1 and sound was working fine. When I upgraded to FC2 Kudzu asked to remove the soundcard configuration. I went ahead and did it thinking it would ask me to reinstall it. Now I don't have sound on my FC2 box.
For some reason my mouse goes ape-shit after switching from the FC2 system to another and back again with my Belkin 4 port SOHO series KVM switch. I can't get it to calm down. Happens in both X and terminal modes. Basically I just have to reboot.
"If I want easy package management with some configuration, why not learn Arch?"
I'm sorry, but the reviewer just isn't qualified to do the review. Does he know that Arch is a source code version control system, whereas the package management systems for Fedora are (your choice of) Up2Date, Yum, and apt-get?
When all you have is a hammer, every problem starts to look like a thumb.
don't worry, no one will take away your precious apples.
I've tried FC2 and SuSE 9.1, both include kernel 2.6. Neither one will properly set up my 3c556B NIC. FC1 configures it right. I don't understand why they took working drivers out of the "updated" kernel...
A cursory glance at this thread would show you pretty clearly that several people commented on the originating site being down, and a few requests were made for someone to post the full text.
"Hi, I'd like to watch Shrek2, but struggling through a packed theater will be an irritation and waste my time. Can someone post it as an AVI?"
Just because it's convenient doesn't stop it from being illegal. (Copyright infringment isn't "theft", but is still a crime)
For the past 5 years, the Slashdot team has denied suggestions to create an automatic cache of linked stories, claiming that it would be illegal for them to do so, even though they know that this will just cause users to paste it into the comments instead.
The slashdot software should automatically download a copy of any pages linked in a submission. Then, if that submission is accepted (but in the 20 minute delay before it goes live), an email should be sent to the webmaster of the linked files. Responding to that email should automatically enable Slashdot to serve a copy of her site for the next 48 hours.
Many website authors would happily permit a temporary mirror to protect their servers.
Indeed. Fedora offers similar support for reading and burning -data- DVDs. What won't be included is software for playing DVD movies (see also DeCSS).
In Fedora, you should use 'dvdrecord' rather than 'cdrecord' for burning data DVDs, incidently. I don't know about SuSE...
I have a Vaio, currntly running FC2, and it is an eternal headache. Modem doesn't work, neither do any of the soft keys (have to reboot to switch video output, for example). Support from Sony is non-existent, and a large proportion of the harware is custom or weird.
In other words, it sucks for Linux. If I had known then what I know now I would never have purchased it.